1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processor and an information updating method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Up to now, an information processor equipped with a non-volatile flash memory that stores a normal system BIOS as firmware and a recovery BIOS intended to recover a normal system and protected from change of stored data has been proposed (see Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 6-266552, for instance). If any trouble occurs upon updating the normal system BIOS and the normal system malfunctions, the information processor disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 6-266552 is activated on the recovery BIOS having a limited function of recovering the normal system, reads the normal system BIOS from a data storage device connected to a flash memory or a processor, and updates the malfunctioning normal system BIOS to thereby recover the normal system BIOS. Since the recovery BIOS has a limited function of recovering the normal system BIOS, a memory area of a flash memory used for recovery can be reduced. In addition, stored data of the recovery BIOS is protected from overwriting, so the normal system BIOS can be relatively reliably recovered.
As disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 6-266552, general information processors update, for example, a communication driver used for receiving information from any other firmware used in the information processors, for example, a connected device through communications in some cases. In such cases, the information processor as disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 6-266552 does not consider the case where the processor cannot communicate with a data storage device. Thus, if an error is detected in new firmware, in particular, information about communication processing, then the processor cannot communicate with a connected device such as a data storage device in some cases. If such an error is detected, it is preferred to easily recover the system. Further, as a possible solution to the trouble upon updating, all firmware to be updated may be saved in another memory area of the flash memory or the like. In this case, however, there arises a problem of increasing a memory area necessary for updating the firmware.